[quote="Kurt"Off topic kinda: Do the Spaniards have a movement who claim that their trains were not bombed by Al Q like the 9/11 and 7/7 "Truther" movements?[/quote]

Yes, altought not a very popular one, but it is a peculiar theory and you should know a bit of Spain politics to understand it, but the most important fact is that the terrorist attack happened 3 days before general elections. In a nutshell, all the conspiracies blame the basque group ETA and what was then the opposition party (PSOE)*, and accuse them of creating the islamic false flag as an excuse to rally the people against the other party (PP, whose president was with Bush, Barroso and Blair at the Azores summit about Iraq), by impliying the islamists attacked because of Spain's involvement in Iraq, and then win the elections. It's a very disturbing conspiracy theory because, well, it's a conspiracy theory, but also a very partisan one, and some important members of the media and politics pandered -as long as it was useful- to those people. As far as I know, today there are just a few marginal "truthters" and their blogs, forums and newsletters are almost deserted.

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case

Glenn Greenwaldguardian.co.uk, Saturday 4 May 2013 08.22 EDT

Former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente, on CNN, discussing government's surveillance capabilities Photograph: CNN screegrabThe real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN's Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is being captured as we speak".

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored:

Let's repeat that last part: "no digital communication is secure", by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained "that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein's claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens" (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that "the data that's being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want."

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.

Strangely, back in 2002 - when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak - the Pentagon's attempt to implement what it called the "Total Information Awareness" program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted - without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo - with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

"'In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance - and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight - that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,' [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. 'Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'"

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That's why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter's TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one's views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.

"4 cylinder Camaro=communism" El Presidente

"You can smoke salmon but it's not quite the same as smoking heroin." nanuq

This reminds me of a minor conspiracy theory from several years ago, around the advent of the smartphone. The gist of it was that iPhones and so forth are actually sold at a loss - they *say* the reason why a computer holding all the world's knowledge that can be operated from almost anywhere on Earth is so affordable is because it's made by sweatshop laborers in China, but actually they are subsidized by the Illuminati/DHS/NWO/lizard people because they give the bad guys a way to track their slaves' every word and movement.

"4 cylinder Camaro=communism" El Presidente

"You can smoke salmon but it's not quite the same as smoking heroin." nanuq

friendlyskies wrote:This reminds me of a minor conspiracy theory from several years ago, around the advent of the smartphone. The gist of it was that iPhones and so forth are actually sold at a loss - they *say* the reason why a computer holding all the world's knowledge that can be operated from almost anywhere on Earth is so affordable is because it's made by sweatshop laborers in China, but actually they are subsidized by the Illuminati/DHS/NWO/lizard people because they give the bad guys a way to track their slaves' every word and movement.

That would only make sense if every smart phone owner had useful information.

The thing with big data is that most of it is wrong or useless.

For example, I shop at Newegg.com. When I do this, I get ads for whatever it was that I just looked at for about two weeks. So either I:

Bought it already.

Or decided not to buy it.

Either way, they got intel on me and applied it and failed. I know it is a shotgun approach but if only 10% of the data gathered hits its mark then someone will make money but not the sellers of hardware. Too much overhead for reward.

Not really conspiracy related, but for a city with such a tough guy image, Boston sure went into bitch mode pretty quick. I mean, Dorner was killing police all over LA for weeks, and even those latte drinking homos didn't lock down. Just another day in LA, ya know? But here we have a bunch of supposed hard drinking, hard working, hard fighting "Irish" (who probably couldn't find Ireland on a map, much less an ancestor who actually came from Ireland within the last 100 years.) who pretty much dropped panties and spread their cheeks for the police state, all because two retards with crockpots went a little crazy. Fuck, next time I run into a Southie, I'm going to give him a box of tampons. Then they've given us what is quite possibly the stupidest (and most ironic) motto known to mankind.

BAWSTON STWONG!

Anyway, if you want to look at it from a conspiracy perspective, yes...they police eventually left, but doesn't mean it wasn't a dry run to see how a populace would react to being put in bitch mode.

I am the object of criticism around the world. But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track.

Q wrote:Anyway, if you want to look at it from a conspiracy perspective, yes...they police eventually left, but doesn't mean it wasn't a dry run to see how a populace would react to being put in bitch mode.

My favorite conspiracy site (though he hates people calling them conspiracy theories, but I can't think of a good euphemism right now), Vigilant Citizen, always talks about how we're being trained to accept a police state, or at least martial law, as normal, fine, and dandy. The images, he argues, are incorporated gratuitously into pop culture, as the "new normal," so we'll see them, become accustomed to them, then stay calm rather than overreact at the sight of situations that would make a 1980s US citizen verrrrrrry nervous - say, a bunch of militarized cops in riot gear clearing out a perfectly peaceful, Constitutionally guaranteed protest, such as #Occupy. Or shutting down an entire city. And so forth.

From Jay-Z and Kanye West's video, "No Church in the Wild"

Adam Lambert's "Never Close Our Eyes"

Ad for Nestlé candy

Rhianna in concert

Rhianna video

Beyonce performing at the Grammys

Daddy Yankee in concert

And so on, and so on. Anyway, it'd be easy to take VC's musings with a grain or two of salt, but we have gotten used to martial law surprisingly easily. Hmmm...

"4 cylinder Camaro=communism" El Presidente

"You can smoke salmon but it's not quite the same as smoking heroin." nanuq

Whitey Bulger in the docks with the surviving Tsarnaev brother on deck, supposedly with Mama The Shoplifter (allegedly) flying in.

The irony is that she shoplifted at Lord & Taylor, is subject to arrest for flight from prosecution for said shoplifting, and it was a Lord & Taylor video camera which helped nail her two twisted sons after the marathon attack.

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